Last month, former President Donald Trump made a video announcement about his plans to implement a ‘quantum leap forward’ policy to increase the standard of living in America. He boldly harkened back to the days of Manifest Destiny, of an America that once tamed a continent and built incredible cities from coast-to-coast.
In a video address detailing this policy, the plan is to build new “Freedom Cities” that would be built on pre-existing government-owned land. A way for the American Machine to be restarted once again, to help revitalise the economy through domestic infrastructure projects, bringing back large-scale industrial manufacturing to the United States, and hopefully drawing citizens who are struggling in their own states with rental traps and shoddy housing opportunities to start anew in these proposed cities.
“Reigniting American imagination” as Trump himself puts it.
Personally, I think this is a great idea. It is high time that the United States needs a project such as this to really kick things into gear and realise just what Americans are capable of building when they are not distracted by foreign wars, social malaise, and being at each other’s throats.
Trump’s plan could act as a foundation to creating classically-designed, bold and truly great examples of American civil engineering and architecture. Not only this, but by perhaps emphasising walkable cities, with a second-to-none public transport network (my formerly proposed Great American Hyper-Rail) – it could serve as an inspiration for other American cities to change for the better.
An American city that could be free from needless congestion, have architecture that challenges the glass-and-steel shitboxes for dominance, and creates real job opportunities and a sense of community for the younger generations would be a very welcome change indeed.
Moreso, if conservatives and reactionaries populate these cities primarily (if not exclusively), they could act as much needed metropolitan safe-zones free from the common strife as well as the severe and petty crime that infects most of urban America today.
While we may not have control of the cities today, it doesn’t mean that we can’t create our own cities tomorrow to act as a powerbase for us to focus our efforts and project them onto rival cities.
All in all, a great and visionary proposal from President Trump.
However there is one thing that was tacked-on to this announcement which has me confused, if not completely mortified by.
Trump proposed that the United States should become the leader in developing ‘vertical take-off and landing’ vehicles – VTOLs, for short. He mentioned that currently “Chy-na!” is spearheading current developments of this technology, for both military and civilian use.
Now, while I get excited by the idea of Jetson-style vehicles as much as the next bloke, tutting along in big glass-domed vehicles. But I can’t help but think that having VTOLs becoming widely available for public and government use is, simply put, a fucking terrible idea.
I may sound like a luddite here, but I ask you to reflect on the changing nature of personal transport in just the last 100 years.
The car and combustion-engine, great inventions as they are (and one that I am demonstrably pro), have completely reshaped the way we get around. From the way our cities are laid out, to the way we travel across the country. We have reshaped entire landmasses to be more suited to automobiles – detonating mountains, building massive highways and turnpikes over natural landscapes. It has completely and possibly irreversibly changed both the aesthetic and function of the natural landscape that human-beings inhabit forever.
There are few areas now in nature where you can look over an unspoiled landscape that hasn’t been in some way corrupted by roads, highways, or massive bridges. The places that are few and far between, and they are hard to reach by design.
The whole point of going on massive hikes like the Appalachian Trail for example, is to get away from these reminders of modernity and industry. If we had VTOLs readily available for anyone to use, these final frontiers of natural escape would be corrupted by the sounds of engines, and the sights of zooming aerial vehicles overhead.
It’s bad enough already when you see hordes of foreign tourists powering up their obnoxious drones drowning out the songs of the birds or the sound of the wind through the trees, or teenagers with loudspeakers blasting grime or whatever unpleasant trap shit that comes onto their Spotify.
Imagine that same annoyance, amplified, en masse and inescapable. To look over a landscape, and to see lines of VTOL traffic from one end of the horizon to the other.
I’d be inclined to shoot these aerial vehicles down in whatever way I could, fully embracing the primal nature that has long been cornered and dormant, finally being unleashed when all sense of greenery and the peace of nature has been corrupted.
Not only this, but aerial vehicles means aerial billboards.
Hell, it’s already starting to happen across the world – massive drone light displays sponsored by our corporate overlords carpeting the sky and blocking our view of the stars. The sky, long-untouched other than by those who are able to navigate it by plane, will simply become another piece of real-estate to be bought up.
Who has the rights to the sky? Those who can afford it, of course.
I can’t think of anything worse than being forced into a scenario where I also have to purchase the real-estate over my house in order to avoid being pestered with unwanted ads, VTOL trespassing, and eyes in the sky.
Perhaps that last example is a little dramatic, but I find it easier to rule nothing out these days, no matter how ridiculous.
The final aspect of why personal VTOLs are such a terrible idea is that it’s completely impractical. With aerial traffic already incredibly congested by planes (look on a free online plane-tracker if you don’t believe me) how does anyone sensibly propose the idea that giving everyone access to the sky won’t lead almost inevitably to disaster?
Car accidents are frequent enough as it is – I can only imagine how much worse, and deadly, they’d be in the sky.
Well to avoid all these issues there would have to be certain controls. Limitations on altitude, certain lanes that aerial vehicles must stick to to avoid collisions, speed limitations, etc, etc. Congratulations, you’re doing all the things that you would’ve been doing in a car anyway, except you are doing them 30-40 metres in the air instead. Such a revolutionary change!
Not to mention, what are these vehicles supposed to look like?
Will they be jet-powered? Say goodbye to little Timmy’s face after he accidentally was standing under one that was flying too low coming in for a landing, and say hello to a frequency of forest-fires!
Will they be powered by rotary propellers? Incredible! You’ve reinvented the helicopter! True leaps and bounds in technology!
Compared to “flying cars”, even personal jetpacks look like more sensible and well thought-out solutions to our current transport problems. Realistically, the only practical implementation of VTOL technology would be usage through military application – and, practically speaking, it already exists through helicopters.
The idea is silly – so how Trump has seriously considered it to the point of outlining it in a policy video makes me laugh. I do sincerely hope that it will remain a mere gimmick of the “futurist” dream, rather than become a reality that will make the world a considerably worse place.
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Conservatives can learn from modern art
You’re probably already baulking at the idea that there could be anything to learn from modern art. You’re not wrong that art and architecture today are often hideous, lazy, cheap, unconsidered, and, well, artless. It won’t help that I myself am still not completely concluded on what there is to learn. Alinskyite tactics of making the enemy live up to their own rules? Did Duchamp just encourage the wrong kind of person and end up making things worse? More on this later.
But there is something in modern art worth considering, it’s not a total waste, you must take wisdom wherever you can find it. There is so little wisdom going. You can’t afford to waste any. Your opponents in the progressives are powerful, rich, and vicious, in all senses of that word. Many, many, many are also group-thinking chasers of convention, out of touch, fearful, vain, and insecure. They don’t believe in the truth, something eternal, irrespective of them, they believe in their truth, as if it emanates from themselves. A pretentious way of saying they want to express their feelings? Perhaps. But truth for them is decided by consensus and fitting in. Yup, that’s
the art sceneprogressives for you.That’s good, that’s a massive weakness. How do you exploit it? How do you handle these people? It’s risky, but people who stand out, do not follow the crowd, have the self-confidence to go their own way, and the actual knowledge and mastery to do it competently, are cool. A big part of what
the art sceneprogressives want to do is fit in and be cool. The risk is that what’s cool, or even just true, for them is decided by consensus, not reality.Art, religion, politics, Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs. What’s the overlap and what can you learn from one to the other? Dismiss all of modern art, if you like, but at least keep one artist. So much which comes after him is basically derivative and misses the point. Let’s follow a master, see what he did and why, and draw out the lessons. You too will make progressives clutch their pearls and faint, or pop their monocles, and exclaim “harumph, why, that is most unorthodox!”
Marcel Duchamp. He is exactly the right kind of figure to look at. Where to start exactly?
Marcel Duchamp is a tricky sort. You could say he was a total troll and he would often go out of his way to obfuscate history by making things up when asked about his work. He was a bit of a prankster, and he liked tinkering with all the new mediums of his day. He was unpredictable.
And modern art. Where to start exactly with that? Not all contemporary art is synonymous with modern art. If that’s not quite difficult enough, it’s not fair to describe all modern art as crap. At least you might concede it’s not all crap in precisely the same way. It’s a low standard, but a place for you to start.
It’s kind of like memes. They’re often highly context dependent, assume some level of preceding knowledge, are trying to say something to the person who sees them, and some memes are better than others.
Similarly, Duchamp is a man of his time. He was clearly interested in technology, and why wouldn’t he be? He’s around at the time of the wireless, new elements and other discoveries coming out of Marie Curie’s laboratory, the invention of cinema, and x-rays. New materials, new mediums, new ways of getting a different insight into the world around you. New ways of thinking. In physics and mathematics Einstein displaces Newton, non-Euclidean geometry bursts forward, the first thoughts about different dimensions. And it’s all happening around WWI, the ends of empires, the international rise of America, and the replacement of Europe’s monarchies.
What is analogous to any of this today? The internet, AI, social media, NFTs, space? New possibilities, new technology, new materials, new politics, it forces people to question things.
Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2
Duchamp’s first important piece: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, an example of cubism, with caveats, because it upset some people.
Some context. Let’s quickly look at the Italian futurists in the 1910s, which started with Marinetti.
The futurists were pretty hard core right wingers (Marinetti co-wrote Il manifesto dei fasci italiani di combattimento), who were obsessed with technology and machinery. They wanted to scrap museums, libraries, forget the past, in favour of a world dedicated to speed, and strength, and the future. Is this what made the trains run on time? Anyway, artistically, they were interested in capturing energy and motion in two dimensions. And it was looking to have something to say. What a lot of people don’t fully appreciate about modern art (you were warned this would get pretentious), is that it involves audience participation. If you’re saying “WTF am I looking at here?”, you are saying a response to the piece.
Before modern art, you have realistic art. Actually, realism, which is what it sounds like. Technology by the 1910s keeps getting more and more advanced, and you have more cameras, and photos, and films, at the time artists were beginning to question the point of a realistic painting. Modern artists were rising to that challenge.
Whether it’s futurists, or dadaists, or surrealists, which all emerge around this time, they’re trying to deal with the paradigm shifts of their day. What are the artists of today up to? How many of them are energised and engaged with the paradigm shifts of our day?
The point is, a lot of art, especially modern art, is contextual, just like a lot of culture, whether it’s stories or music, movies, etc. to fully appreciate its impact you really have to be there and part of it. This goes beyond art, well into politics. How do you explain the world pre and post 9/11 to those who weren’t there? The New Atheism movement made more sense in the face of religious extremism, whether that was muslims like bin Laden or evangelicals like Bush.
Modern art emerges amid two world wars, and the blossoming of progressive democracy and its three fruits; communism, facism, and liberalism.
The futurists believed that war is the world’s only moral hygiene, a chance to start anew, that art gets shifted into the new world it brings forth. And then rather a lot of them died in WWI and that was more or less that.
Now, here comes a particularly important thing. A bunch of these art movements would come with manifestos. That is, instructions for how art is and isn’t supposed to be. Rules for what you could and couldn’t express and in what way. The simultaneous scrapping of the past, obsession with what’s new, a certain reverence for violence and domination, and replacement with a new hierarchy. No rules, and also rules, and lots of angry people. Does that sound familiar to you at all, duckies? Have progressives been the same for a hundred years, maybe more?
Well, when art comes with rules, and particularly about what it is supposed to say to people, that is almost certainly propaganda. Oscar Wilde might have had something to say against this (The Picture of Dorian Gray), or Kim Il Sung in favour, as Juche art is supposed to carry a moral, political element to it.
Can we forgive the futurists? They were working before the full, crushing horror of the progressive 20th Century.
Anyway, Duchamp’s Nude changes the art movement of his time, challenges it, mocks it. The full saga of the Nude takes place over a couple of years. He presents it at the pretentiously named (the progressives are all very self-congratulatory aren’t they?) Salon des Indépendants where the cubists reject it. Remember that art is supposed to be full of rules? Cubism is supposed to be about multiple dimensions portrayed simultaneously. Futurism is supposed to be about motion. The Nude is both. Oh no, what a disaster! Most unorthodox!
So, in 1912 some exhibits were supposed to happen at the Salon des Indépendants. The futurists came first, that was all lovely, and the cubists were supposed to come after. Some of the smaller cubists came together to do their own thing and have an “art movement”. Duchamp was having none of it.
The first thing the cubists had a problem with was the title, but Duchamp puts the title right in the painting, so it can’t be hidden, removed, changed, disguised. Total troll. He’s also trying to play with language. It was originally titled “Nu descendant l’escalier” in the literature, and “Nu” is ambiguously male. Worse still, nudes are supposed to be painted lying down, like one of your French girls. Nudes aren’t supposed to be descending stairs. What’s more, the only place naked women were likely to be descending stairs in Paris was at brothels or Mallard Chairman Jake Scott’s mum’s house.
All round, the hanging committee (not as ominous as it sounds) for the exhibit were totally scandalised. Have a look at the painting again. Yup. Duchamp was told to change it, the title was wrong, the painting was too futurist, too Italian, just no good, so he left and removed himself from the show. Something similar then gets repeated in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York.
So much for artists being open-minded or intellectual. Then again, are you surprised that there’s a lot of snobby arseholes in the art world who get bitchy?
Still, Duchamp had the last laugh. Who else out of the cubists exhibited at the Salon is remembered as well today? In Duchamp’s own time, at the Armory, the next year, he was peer level with Picasso as a cubist, and other artists such as Matisse, Delauney, Kandinsky, Rodin, Renoir, and others.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
Alright, so where can Duchamp go from here? His next piece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, is an even further descent into top notch trolling.
Duchamp really wanted to get into the idea of the fourth dimension with Bride, in the geometric, not temporal sense.
In three dimensions, you can imagine a point within a three dimensional cube and create a coordinate for it along width, height, and depth. A fourth dimensional point would sit in relation to all three of those – it might be like if you could see all sides of the cube and its inside at the same time. And if this four dimensional shape could cast a shadow, it would be a three dimensional shadow, just like a three dimensional object casts a two dimensional shadow on a wall, for example.
The idea was that if you could put three dimensional reality into two dimensions in a painting, what is a three dimensional piece a step down from? You can’t seem to make it real, exactly, so you have to sort of imagine it instead. Can you imagine a tesseract, the fourth dimensional equivalent of a cube? Here’s a representation of the concept.
For a two dimensional painting, it should come very naturally to you to understand what three dimensional object or scene it represents. For any of you duckies who have spent time thinking about non-Euclidean geometry, perhaps Bride might come a bit easier to you.
Or not. But it’s a commendable attempt at trying something new from Duchamp.
So, yes, you will definitely look at it and think WTF is this, but this is very much by design. Though he started the piece in 1915, and it would go on exhibit 12 years later in 1927, he would later publish notes in 1934 as an accompaniment. He did not want a purely visual response.
How did this take him so long to complete, you ask? His patrons said they’d pay his rent until he finished.
Now, at this point you’re probably asking a very justified question. How much is Duchamp really just a bullshit artist? Well, that’s a kind of art too. He’s at least a little funny, a little clever, and a little daring. Can the same be said for progressives?
Duchamp at this point is experimenting. He’s playing with chance. Art is usually done very deliberately, but is it possible to create something through other methods? Are you limited in your materials? Is it possible to use abstract concepts themselves to make something? Is it sometimes more interesting to achieve something that you didn’t exactly set out to do?
There are a few replicas of Bride. The original in Philadelphia is broken, it broke on its way to the original exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The ones in Sweden and Tokyo are not broken, and are a different experience. They’re also all getting a bit worse for wear. Duchamp didn’t necessarily make things to last. That wasn’t important. His personality itself is perhaps more the figure, more the legacy, than any of his works.
Disposability and personality? He would have been perfect in today’s world of memes, social media, and reality TV. Self-belief, showmanship, fake it til you make it, bullshit artistry. Politicians are memed into success these days. This kind of chaos, flexibility, fun, unpredictability, is not open to the progressives. They have a hegemony to conserve. You have a hegemony to subvert.
You could do worse than to learn from Duchamp.
Fountain
Oh boy. Duckies, if I haven’t lost you already, this one might do it.
Duchamp is in America at this point. America, unlike Europe, has no real history at this time. Plus ça change. (French. You were warned this would get pretentious). Are there lessons to learn here about the internet and the internet generations? Not sure, perhaps you can think about that one.
Anyway, a lot of artists go to America because of the war and Duchamp is asked to run a show. The New York art scene wants to replicate the show Duchamp’s Nude was kicked out of. The Americans want to have a go at their own Independence. How derivative. So, two of the conditions for the show was that there was to be no jury and no prize. It’s like the Oscars. There are no winners. “And the award goes to…”. You can’t have winners. That would imply some people are better than others. No, jury, no prize, nothing is better than anyone else, but it’s still a selective hoighty toighty art show. All the artists who kicked Duchamp out of the 1912 exhibit will be there. Duchamp detects an opportunity.
He takes a urinal, signs it R Mutt and, sure enough, it is kicked out of the show. But it gets photographed.
Duchamp is making another mockery, running another test here. Why can’t a nude descend a staircase? Who made these rules? Who makes art rules? A lot of the audience had never even seen a urinal before, which makes it even funnier.
Duchamp is working with context. Everyone sees a toilet every day. Even prissy art snobs. You can’t look at one in an art exhibit? Why exactly? It’s extreme, sure, and you wouldn’t be impressed with it, duckies, but you’re not pretending to be progressive and egalitarian and open and free or whatever. Duchamp puts a toilet right in the middle of a fancy shmancy art show for all the people who are up themselves for reasons they don’t understand and they lose their minds.
And to this day, people are still debating whether it’s art. In today’s digital economy, when so much is abstracted – social interaction, work from home, shopping, entertainment, etc, – this debate is as relevant as ever.
Really this is about the governing classes, who today are the progressives. If you don’t understand three things by now, you really ought to. First, the ruling class don’t care about the rules in the same way many of the governed do, because they make them, know why they’re there, and what they’re trying to do with them, for power. Second, a lot of the governed really don’t know why their rules are there, but follow them anyway, for many reasons, and only care about the rules at the surface level. Third, a big chunk of the middle class gets up itself precisely because they’re not in the ruling class, are close enough to sniff it, can see it, want it, but aren’t truly in it, and don’t fully understand it.
The most important thing about Fountain is that Duchamp has a sense of humour. It’s even funnier that there was only one photo at the time, the Fountain now is just a replica, and nobody has even seen the original for 50 years. We don’t actually know if Duchamp was making everything up.
Duchamp used to make stuff up in TV interviews. Performance artist? Certainly an early iteration of it. It’s not just enough to subvert the progressives in your work.
You must live it.
Readymades
Well, one in particular. L.H.O.O.Q., which is basically a meme.
The readymades were more or less mass manufactured products which Duchamp sort of took, made a few alterations to, and declared pieces. Yup, that’s a meme. Fair use!
L.H.O.O.Q. is a picture of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee drawn on. Factory produced graffiti? This is 40 years before Warhol, and how long before Banksy? L.H.O.O.Q. was only possible because of advances in technology.
The readymades are a tension between art and not art (pretentiousness continued) – you can go to a museum, look at an exhibit with a urinal set with a sign saying “do not touch” then go into the bathroom and do rather a lot more than touch. The question for you is why is one thing there and not the other? The Mona Lisa (the real one) is there because it obviously should be there?
The answer is “yes”, btw.
Duchamp here is mocking style, taste, and aesthetics, he’s asking questions about reverence, perhaps even worship, but Duckies, don’t rankle. Duchamp is forcing the protection of what’s valuable, of what’s genuinely accomplished and beautiful. There is something to defend in the rules set around beauty conventions. Just not the progressive ones where the rule is that there are no rules, but there are rules, and they’re the ones who control them. If there’s one thing you should recognise about progressives it’s that they don’t exactly care what they’re telling you to do as much as they care that they are the ones telling you to do it.
Duckies, don’t rankle at Duchamp attacking hierarchies in art. This is good when the hierarchy is intolerably corrupt. Duckies, you are against the status quo.
Duchamp basically agrees with the audience that trash is not really art.
What’s next?
If the 20th Century was about the great democratisation of technology, and all the chaos and opportunity that it brought (Twitter?), perhaps the 21st Century can be about the great ordering of technology with stable command. (Twitter + Elon?).
The last piece Duchamp does is Étant donnés. It’s a great big installation piece now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You could be forgiven for missing the most important part. It’s only visible through two peepholes in a door. And what you see looks like this. A nude, reclined against a landscape backdrop, what you might call a “real painting”, a real life piece, not readymade crap.
Duchamp kept this a secret between two girlfriends and his wife, only revealing the work after his death, and 25 years after he had apparently retired from art to play competitive chess.
Is this what Duchamp believed about art all along?
Duckies, relax, keep yourself in check, and stay cool. Let people enjoy themselves. There’s no real need to get snobby about other people’s tastes.
But also know your own. Do your thing. Let the progressives get on with theirs. They have all sorts of rules and ideas and it’s all built on sand. #Walkway? Disengage, do your own thing. They can do their thing. You’re going to do something cool that doesn’t care about their rules. In turn, your thing will show up theirs, passively. Show, don’t tell. Let them be ridiculous by comparison. Let it come naturally and not because you’ve driven them there.
Or maybe it’s all a load of rubbish? Duchamp used elements of luck as his materials in creating Bride. Jackson Pollock still came along as if he was doing something new with his drip period 20 years after. Andy Warhol still came along 40 years later with his prints as if the readymades hadn’t basically done the same thing before. And contemporary art keeps going.
Duchamp didn’t make anyone realise how ridiculous they were.
Did you just read this entire piece for nothing?
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How to Deal with an Ideological Villain
A pet peeve of mine is when an antagonist in a book, show, or movie is driven by an ideology that, when he or she is inevitably defeated, nonetheless remains without being dismantled or rendered inept in some way. While, today, it is more often the protagonist driven by his or her writer’s self-inserted worldview, antagonists have, for over a century, often had ideological motivations–saving the climate, achieving some form of racial or sexual (but never ideological) equity, promoting radical resource conservation, whatever. Of course, we keep our hands clean by having the villain nominally lose, but that still leaves the ideology to be dealt with.
If left unanswered, the antagonist’s scheme, though foiled in its dastardly implementation, can too easily become a case of a merely overzealous attempt to produce what some believe to be a nonetheless good, noble goal with whatever hue of progressivism initially drove him or her. The good and the bad becomes, thus, not a matter of principle or goal but of method–the villain or villainess was such because he or she was too radical for those around him or her, etc. Hence, you get people considering whether the Marvel Universe’s Thanos was right in trying to reduce planetary populations by half, whether it wouldn’t be just for Godzilla: King of the Monsters’s Dr. Emma Russel to accelerate some a titanic climate emergency to fully dispense with humanity, or whether X-Men’s Magneto’s openly violent revolution for minority-mutant acceptance wouldn’t be justified–if not just a little satisfying.
Of course, the author who led the way with dealing with explicitly ideological villains was Dostoevsky, who reached his zenith of popularity, not to mention innovation, by dismantling Turgenev’s and Chernyshevsky’s ideological heroes. He did this often through mockery but predominantly through exposing to light of their ideologies through his antagonists who share them. Let us attend: the two–exposure and mockery–can and arguably should go hand-in-hand.
Dostoevsky made it his M.O. to resolve his characters’ conflicts by showing why their motivations are as bad as (or worse than) the attempted implementation. However, there was another writer, up to whom Dostoevsky looked, who was already doing this in England before Dostoevsky hit the Russian literary scene. I am, of course, talking about Charles Dickens.
No reader of Dickens can miss his criticism of the perspectives and politics of his day, be it open scorn, mocking satire, or earnest plea. While not all of his villains recant their ideas, one of his most complete cases of repentance is also one of his most popular tales, especially come Yuletide. This is none other than A Christmas Carol.
Now, readers will not need me to review the plot of Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name has become synonymous with Christmas in the English-speaking world. However, I nonetheless want to briefly examine points in Scrooge’s arc to see how it is not only his avarice but also the then popular ideology that justified it that is defeated in the end. Dickens pretty handily sets up the contemporary pop philosophy that gilds Scrooge’s greed. Rejecting personal charity for the impersonal, tax-funded state institutions of ‘“prisons…Union workhouses…the Treadmill and the Poor Law,”’ he identifies himself in the first scene as a Social Darwinist and Malthusian Utilitarian. ‘“Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,”’ as one of the scene’s collectors of charity puts it? Bah–humbug! ‘“I help to support the establishments I have mentioned,”” he says, ‘“they cost enough; and those that are badly off must go there…If they would rather die…they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”’ In Scrooge, Dickens concretises the worst versions of the ideologies gaining popularity as an increasingly rationalistic society dispensed with Christian superstitions of God’s image in each individual, and with them the Christian ethics behind giving of one’s own to the poor.
Of course, Dickens includes us in the dramatic irony that Scrooge’s integrity is neither admirable nor monstrous (yet), but pitiable and foolish. The former is articulated when, drawn through key moments of his past by the Ghost of Christmases thereof–his lonely Christmases as a child, his little sister who would leave behind his supposedly foolish nephew, his erstwhile love for the Christmas season at Old Fezziwig’s regardless of its cost in ‘mortal money’–Scrooge is reminded of how spectacularly he fumbled the bag with his fiancée Belle by grasping a different bag too tightly. The enlightened self-righteousness of Scrooge’s post-Christian ethic is neither as internally consistent nor as impressive as its holder might try to maintain: juxtaposing Scrooge’s excited apology for Fezziwig’s party in spite of himself with an unwillingness to look on the greed that would lead to his present loneliness, Dickens makes clear that Scrooge’s ideological righteousness covers a deeply buried sense of failure, regret, and betrayal of the best aspects of his past self. The scene shakes Scrooge’s supposedly staid principles, and his explicit and implicit admissions that gold is not the be-all, end-all valuer of life serve to begin his reformation.
Having shown why Scrooge is to be pitied for his Malthusian views (which he may not even fully hold), Dickens progresses to show Scrooge that he has also been unnecessarily foolish to hold them. Satisfying the first scene’s foreshadowing, this foolishness is shown when the Ghost of Christmas Present gives us more of his nephew, Fred.
Hard on the heels of shaming Scrooge with the mistreated Bob Cratchit’s nonetheless toasting him, the second Ghost presents Fred’s dinner party, sans uncle. Whereas Cratchit politely rebuffed his wife’s insults to Scrooge, Fred does the same to his wife’s with jollity. ‘“His wealth is of no use to him. He doesn’t do any good with it.”’ When his wife says, ‘“I have no patience with him,”’ Fred returns:
‘“Oh, I have!…I am sorry for him: I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself, always…[The] consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with us, is, as I think, that…he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts, either in his moldy old office or his dusty chambers. I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity him.”’
The girls mock the idea of Scrooge’s ever taking Fred up on that chance. However, unbeknownst to them, their mock unknowingly digs the knife of change further into the invisible uncle–not by disclaiming the immorality of his avarice (which might harden him), but by showing how foolish he is to maintain his proud isolation in it.
And the fact is that Scrooge would much rather be with them. In spite of himself, he tries his invisible darnedest to play along with the group’s games, which leads him, unsuspectingly, into being the butt of the night’s climactic joke. Having already shown Scrooge the ineffectuality of his gold and spite, Dickens meets both not with other characters’ argument but with mockery. Little wonder that the later Dostoevsky, who would mock his characters while showing the disastrous real-world consequences of their ideas, counted Dickens as one of his primary influences.
And yet, Dickens does not risk leaving things there, for one man’s pitiable past and foolish present might not undermine an entire ideology, even to the man himself. Before he leaves, the second Ghost reveals to Scrooge the true nature of his ideas–in the forms of the emaciated siblings, Ignorance and Want, hidden beneath his heretofore abundant cloak. ‘“Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.”’ Pushed to choose between the utilitarian phrases of his ideology and his own human sympathy, Scrooge ultimately cannot utter the former.
Readers don’t need me to review Scrooge’s interview with the third Ghost. Suffice it to say, his initial viewpoint, if followed through, will land him little posthumous respect among the living, even those who nominally venerate the old skinflint. Furthermore, to add insult to injury, with none to care for his affairs, Scrooge’s possessions will land in the hands of petty thieves–who, as a last insult to his way of life, parody him in their penny pinching over his personal effects. In death, he is treated according to the utilitarian ideology he espoused in life.
Now, several moments in A Christmas Carol are, without a doubt, moralistic and even a bit preachy in dealing with Scrooge’s ideology (example, the two waifs, above), and can, thus, arguably be skipped in retellings or depictions without the story’s–or Scrooge’s humbling’s–losing much weight. As I have previously written on the story, the falling away of such excesses, bound as they are to ideas and issues contemporary to its writing, is the beginning of a work’s usefulness as art. That so much of A Christmas Carol remains despite its initial polemic speaks to Dickens’s ability to make a point without its feeling like he is doing so.
And yet, his depiction of Social Darwinism remains relevant–not the least because Scrooge’s hardnosed display foreshadows those in our own day who promote state redistribution schemes while foregoing personal charity, yet somehow still thinking themselves moral and on the side of the poor. Furthermore, current progressive ideologies often take on the same self-satisfied tone, even glee, as Scrooge at the supposedly justified handicap or destruction (always their fault) of the designated outgroup–white men, “the rich,” landlords, heteronormative family units, groups indigenous to European lands, etc. Their hijacking every medium they can for the sake not of creating good art but of spreading “The Message” has left a dearth of art and stories that seek not only to include the majority of audiences but also to simply be good for their own sake. The question among conservative creators (which, as I argue in the above linked article, not to mention my novel, includes many more than those who consider or label themselves conservative) of how to create the best art can and should point us to authors like Dickens and Dostoevsky.
While politics was not the point for such authors, they did not shy away from dealing with insidious ideas of their day. The difference between them and authors who see art as inherently political was and should be that, in treating art as a function of greater things than politics–not to mention weighing it against human experience and tradition–they exposed inhuman ideas fully in the lives of their characters. Such a thing necessarily leads, as can be seen in A Christmas Carol, towards at least some characters’ repenting of their ideology towards a more wholistically human ethic that balances personal rights and interests with duties and responsibilities for others–one I would argue is best found in the Christian view of man and its subsequent moral tradition, articulated implicitly in Dickens and explicitly in Dostoevsky.
Like many pre-20th-century books, A Christmas Carol is refreshing, if nothing else because its lesson is for its protagonist (who is also its antagonist), not its readers, who are included in the joke. However, even thus reducing it to a “lesson” is to render it as inhumanly provincial as is the pre-repentance Scrooge. We should look to older literature not just to nostalgically escape the present (though that’s often a necessary salve), nor to learn how to “retvrn” to a time before all the other advancements our culture has made (on the backs of the previous centuries’ literature and ethics, one should add). We should do so because older books have survived the changing of times.
Said survival is not, as Marxist progressives claim, because their popularity has been artificially and oppressively maintained in various social traditions and structures (though one man’s supposedly oppressive structure might be many other men’s most efficient means of justly and safely ordering society). Rather, it is because their authors concretised elements of human life that are and will remain immutably true. That, of course, can have implicit ideological or political (etc.) ramifications, but such accidental effects are not their core substance. Watching a rendition of A Christmas Carol to get into the Christmas spirit might have the effects of motivating us to give to the less fortunate or to look, Cratchit-like, with forgiveness on even the most oppressive of our fellow men (or on ourselves, as Scrooge, himself, learns to do). However, to see this kind of thing as inherently political or ideological is, itself, to maintain an ideology about the relationship between art, actual people, and each other that would reduce all three. Thankfully, should we want to dismantle such a thing, we know where to look.
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Britain’s Brown Scare
A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of fascism. At least, that’s what we’re told.
In Technology, Communism, and The Brown Scare, Curtis Yarvin defines The Brown Scare as: “America’s ginormous, never-ending, profoundly insane witch-hunt for fascists under the bed.”
However, it is blatantly apparent that this witch-hunt is not inherently American in character. Indeed, such paranoia greatly afflicts the wider Western world, and certainly the United Kingdom.
This month, Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London said: “Those that have legitimate objections [to ULEZ expansion] are joining hands with a far-right group.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade, some of those outside are part of the far-right, some are Covid-deniers, some are vaccine deniers, some are Tories.”
Currently, ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emission Zone) covers all areas within the North and South Circular Roads, but is set to expand across all London boroughs from 29th August 2023.
Vehicles that are not ULEZ-compliant will receive a daily charge of £12.50. This means that cars, motorcycles, vans, and specialist vehicles up to and including 3.5 tonnes, and minibuses up to and including 5 tonnes, will be charged.
Exemptions will be given to lorries, vans, or specialist heavy vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, and buses, minibuses, and coaches over 5 tonnes, which will continue to pay the Low Emissions Charge (LEZ) charge.
Unsurprisingly, there have been a range of objections to ULEZ expansion.
Many commuters cannot afford the charge and fear it will be detrimental to small businesses. Others are angered that no such proposal was included in Khan’s manifesto, and that the results of the ensuing consultation on ULEZ expansion have been ignored.
Some object to the planned expansion of surveillance that is required to make the policy workable, whilst others argue ULEZ is unworkable altogether and will not help lower carbon emissions.
On the whole, none of these positions are conspiratorial. If anything, they’re all pretty straightforward expressions of democratic and economic concern.
Nevertheless, all these objections are irrelevant because, at least according to Khan, opposition to an arbitrary proposal that will destroy livelihoods, expand mass-surveillance, and do little to help the environment is, allegedly, tainted by vague “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) tendencies.
As many have surmised, this is nothing more than a political tactic. Khan hopes that by condemning objections as “FAR RIGHT” (!!!), the Anti-ULEZ campaign will divert time, energy, and resources away from protesting his insane and popular policy, and towards expunging their association with the unnamed, unsubstantiated, likely fictitious and/or irrelevant “far-right group”.
Whilst this is true, it misses a more straightforward point, albeit one that is harder to bring up: just because something is “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Why would it matter if ULEZ is opposed by the “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!)? As a policy, ULEZ is either good or bad depending on its intent, feasibility, and results and should be deliberated and implemented accordingly.
Unfortunately, the Sensible People, despite their obsession with Forensics, care very little for detail. Totally PR-brained, the ‘connotations’ of one’s words carry infinitely more weight than what one actually says.
As such, they are not only inclined to pedantic language-policing, they assess politics by every metric other than policy.
Take the Wakefield controversy as another example. A group of four children, and their families, received death threats after word got out that one had smudged a copy of the Quran, the Islamic holy text, as well as a suspension from their school, despite the headmaster’s declaration that there was: “no malicious intent by those involved.”
Consequently, the boy’s mother was dragged into the local mosque – by the police, no less – in what can only be described as Modern Britain’s equivalent of a Struggle Session.
Teary, veiled, and evidently shaken, she profusely apologised for the behaviour of her son, who is autistic, stating: “[he] doesn’t always realise what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.”
As we all know by now, in Modern Britain, the role of the police isn’t to prevent the type of crime that led to its founding. Recent data, published in The Times, shows that serious crimes, including but not limited to: harassment, assault, stalking, and criminal damage are virtually legal, and that charge rates have plummeted to an all-time low since 2015.
Rather, the purpose of the British police is to calm the ungrounded fears of society’s most unhinged members, those who believe that Britain’s traditional identity, and the preservation of it, inherently predisposes people to THE FAR-RIGHT (!!!), and that there is an omnipresent conspiracy to turn Britain into the least ethnically homogenous ethnostate in history.
As such, the permanent policy of the contemporary British state is not protection, but social engineering; it is one of never-ending, domestic, ‘de-Nazification’.
In fact, this establishment-sanctioned whataboutism, perpetually pointing the finger at the FAR-RIGHT (!!!), is so pervasive that not even national travesties can escape its grasp.
Charlie Peters’ recent documentary, aired by GBNews in February, outlined the scandalous racially charged abduction, trafficking, and rape of thousands of young white girls by south Asian men; a practice which took place across the UK over multiple decades.
Despite the eye-watering amount of completely preventable suffering caused by the scandal, it was clear that such evil was continuously swept under-the-rug by British police; specifically, for the sake of “political correctness” and “community cohesion.”
Like the police, whose complicity in suppressing public knowledge of the scandal has not resulted in a single firing, left-leaning and liberal-leaning individuals, led by a pseudo-academic, are calling for the censorship of Peters’ documentary, believing it emboldens the far-right, stokes racial stereotypes, and promotes “hate” and “division”.
Needless to say, but worth saying nonetheless, when 1 in 73 Muslim males in Rotherham are involved with paedophilic rape gangs, there is no community cohesion to fuss over – it simply doesn’t exist.
This is perhaps the defining feature of Britain’s Brown Scare: it prevents people from understanding what is right in front of them, whether it’s the condition of one’s community or one’s own material interests.
The Manchester Arena bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack and the first suicide bombing in the UK since the 7/7 bombings, conducted by a foreign-trained Islamist that came to Britain as a refugee, has been retroactively rewired to make the bombing about the threat of FAR-RIGHT (!!!), as opposed to Islamist, radicalisation.
No doubt about it, if a civilisation-ending meteor were to crash into Earth, Britain’s pseudo-intelligentsia, the Waterstones Intellectuals that they are, would use their last moments to make pseudo-profound remarks about how such a travesty would ‘embolden’ THE FAR-RIGHT (!!!).
All this said, it’s clear that this delusional preoccupation with an impending fascist threat isn’t a recently-concocted political tactic. Rather, it is at the centre of the West’s post-war secular theocracy. As such, we can expect The Brown Scare to afflict wider culture, more so than mainstream politics, and indeed it does.
Whether it’s Coronation Street’s goofy storyline about a white working-class kid joining the “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) after he’s replaced by a refugee at his old school, or the upcoming 60th anniversary special of Doctor Who, which is set to feature an antagonistic “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) party, aestheticized as a mishmash of every “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) development as of recent: GBNews, Patriotic Alternative, MAGA, Brexit Party, Vote Leave, The Conservative Party, you name it.
Drag Queen Story Time, which involves an adult-entertainer talking to infants about sexual exploration, gender identity, and… other things – Y’know, good family-friendly stuff – was hosted at Tate Britain, inciting sizeable protests and counter-protests. How did the media portray this debacle? As a far-right attack on human rights, but ultimately a triumph for liberal society.
Erstwhile, Prevent, the government’s own anti-terror programme, has flagged various films and TV series as FAR-RIGHT (!!!) material, including but certainly not limited to: Zulu, The Dam Busters, Yes Minister, Civilisation, The Thick of It, and (perhaps most ridiculously of all) Great British Railway Journeys.
In addition, the list features authors ranging from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to Thomas Carlyle and Edmund Burke. Tolkien, Lewis, Conrad, Huxley, even Orwell, make a debut on an official red-flag list used and taken seriously by the British state.
Even the works of our national poet, Shakespeare, were listed as potentially dangerous material. Considering this, it’s no wonder they are being adapted to conform to our post-war neurosis, with a recent showing of The Merchant of Venice being about fighting Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
At this point, one cannot pretend that the scare is just a fringe, confined conspiracy – it’s a widespread, mainstream conspiracy theory that masses of people, “low-status” or “high-status”, have bought into wholesale.
Things have gotten so bad that the BBC, not exactly in good books of “THE FAR RIGHT” (!!!), or the right in general for that matter, had to release a press statement telling people stating that, despite rumours of a “sixth episode” being pulled to avoid “right-wing backlash”, no such episode of Sir David Attenborough’s new series, Wild Isles, exists or has ever existed.
Given this daily bombardment of delusion, there is a tendency to push back; to demonstrate a more measured approach to the topic of fascism, usually echoing, or making direct reference to, Orwell’s words in What is Fascism?:
“The word is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
This tendency is completely understandable. When Reform UK and left-wing individuals with mildly gender-critical views are listed alongside fringe and powerless Neo-Nazi weirdos as threats to society, one gets the impression that those seeking to affirm the veracity of UK-wide fascist collusion are, to say the least, scraping the barrel.
However, this misses the overarching point: according to those afflicted by Britain’s Brown Scare, nothing is in possession of any inherent quality.
From raiding wallets to raping, bombing, and harassing children, from blacklisting timeless literature to human trafficking, things most people would consider egregious, only become worthy of condemnation depending on their imagined relative proximity to Adolf Hitler, or their hypothesised potential to ‘embolden’ the “FAR RIGHT” (!!!).
Most recently, of course, Gary Lineker has been suspended from the BBC after he compared the government’s recent attempts to crack down on illegal channel crossings to 1930s Germany.
Whether one thinks Lineker deserves to be suspended or not is beside the point: Britain’s Brown Scare is believed by those in positions of considerable influence, not just nutty FBPE parochialists.
With a general election set to take place next year, and a Labour victory all but officialised, we can expect Britain’s Brown Scare to get worse, especially when Modern Britain’s founder, Tony Blair, is effectively shadow-leading the party.
Besides, how are Labour meant to remain in power if they don’t satiate the delusions of those that support them to save the NHS and immigrants from Tory Brexit Fascist UKIP Stalinism?
However, none of this means Labour is popular. The British people would like nothing more than a new party, with one-quarter of Brits saying they would support a party led by Farage, which is prepared to lower immigration, bring economic stability and growth, and tackle crimes that people actually care about.
It goes without saying that such a party, unlike the current Conservative Party, should be willing to protect right-minded citizens from the detached and paranoid fury which afflicts much of the populus, and threatens what remains of our livelihoods and liberties.
Many things can happen in politics, but one thing is certain: as long as the Brown Scare continues to spread, speaking the truth will remain a revolutionary act, and those with an outlook barely distinct from David Icke will be considered Sensible Centrists by everyone in a position of power.
